Demografiamundo

ESA/P/WP/224 March 2012 English only

Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division ! ! ! ! ! ! !

World Urbanization Prospects The 2011 Revision
Highlights

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United Nations New York, 2012

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KEY FINDINGS OF THE 2011 REVISION
1. Major disparities in the level of urbanization exist among development groups. Thus, whereas the proportion urban in the more developed regions was already nearly 54 per cent in 1950, it will still take another decade for half of the population of the less developed regions to live in urban areas (figure I).
Figure I. Urban and rural populations by development group, 1950-2050

2. The world urban population is expected to increase by 72 per cent by 2050, from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion in 2050. By mid-century the world urban population will likely be the same size as the world’s total population was in 2002. Virtually all of the expected growth in the world population will be concentrated in the urban areas of the less developed regions, whose population is projected to increase from 2.7 billion in 2011 to 5.1 billion in 2050. Over the same period, the rural population of the less developed regions is expected to decline from 3.1 billion to 2.9 billion. In the more developed regions, the urban population is projected to increase modestly, from 1 billion in 2011 to 1.1 billion in 2050 (table 1).

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3. The world rural population is expected to reach a maximum of 3.4 billion in 2021 and to decline slowly thereafter, to reach 3.05 billion in 2050. These global trends are driven mostly by the dynamics of rural population growth in the less developed regions, which house today almost 92 per cent of the world rural population. Whereas the rural population of the more developed regions has been declining steadily during the second half of the twentieth century and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, the rural population of the less developed regions more than